I have I5 2500k (LGA 1155) with boxed cooler and default thermal paste. Overall Temp is good but with some of never games(Dragon Age) Its getting up to 85c.My Case Is ENERMAX Staray ECA3170. It has built in frontal Fan, and I added one at the back. so Air goes in from front and is sucked away at the back.Case is sitting on top of table, BUT the side with holes is facing wall.

85 is showing red in Asus program and giving me warnings, honestly I don't know if 85 is realy bad or just normal when stressed with games. But I think I need better CPU cooler then boxed one and some thermal paste. And I Can't spend a lot on fancy cooling systems.

can you help me choosing cooler and thermal paste?

P.S some of the CPU Coolers out there look real bigass, since they will be placed vertically how much issue will their weight be? I mean some are 500gramsand more, all that weight on motherboard??

Given the chart on that page though, if you can afford to tack on another $10 to your budget, you may want to consider dropping the fan that comes with the 212, and going with a quieter 120mm fan, like the nexus Real Silent 120 they use as a reference (I'm quite fond of it myself). At full speed, the 212's stock fan will cool a little better, but only by about 4 degrees C, where as if I'm reading the chart right, it'll also be about 4x as loud.

Last edited by gbcrush on Thu Apr 21, 2011 9:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

As far as the weight of the thing, sticking out sideways over the CPU, that's not a problem these days as most of the heat sinks come with an additional back-plate. That is, there's a sturdy metal plate that goes behind the motherboard, that helps keep the cooler tight to the CPU and provides support so that the mobo/cpu don't crack under strain.

Of course, few "bigass" coolers still don't ship with those. These coolers should be avoided like the plague.

As far as the weight of the thing, sticking out sideways over the CPU, that's not a problem these days as most of the heat sinks come with an additional back-plate. That is, there's a sturdy metal plate that goes behind the motherboard, that helps keep the cooler tight to the CPU and provides support so that the mobo/cpu don't crack under strain.

Of course, few "bigass" coolers still don't ship with those. These coolers should be avoided like the plague.

hellwalker wrote: how much is hyper 212 cooler then stock one? will it drop that extra 12c?

Impossible to tell. Always in motion, the future is. But just switching out heatsinks and properly using some good thermal paste can definitely work wonders. 12c is definitely in the realm of possibility.

Given that SPCR cooled a 4-core i7 with a greater thermal allowance than your i5-2500k, and kept it in the at 58 - 62c range (fan@full tilt) and at 69c (fan undervolted quite a bit), I think your chances are good.

Just make sure you wipe the CPU spreader clean (rubbing alcohol works well on thermal goop), and let it dry when you remove the old cooler. Use something good like the Arctic silver 5 you picked out, and get a good even (and thin if you can manage it) spread across the whole surface before you attach the new cooler.

HiI bought a Mo-Bo p8P67-M and a cpu I5 2500k, installed them with the given fan and had 48-53 C. On the bios i was set to normal performance, i didn't try to get better. Just got today a fan cooler master hyper 212 plus and i'm very impressed by the results around 32 C with 3.3ghz . Plus, i didnt saw at first sight when i installed my drivers of mother board but on the cd there is the AI Suite II software that configure the best overclocking. I tried the rapid config and had 4.3Ghz at 21 C. So I tried the extreme config and at 4.8 ghz everything shuts down, blue error screen blabla. Restart and set to 4.7 ghz automatically, still 21 C.